Posts Tagged ‘Google’

So you’ve learnt some top SEO tips, whacked the words Britney Spears and sex into every second headline, gained your first million subscribers and hyperlinked loads of cool stuff. People are falling over themselves to visit your site, right?

Well … WordPress, as I’ve written about before (click here), gives you the search terms people use en route to reading you. When I see “Innocent in Australia” or my name I sigh with relief and then say: “Go on, son, well done, mate, she’ll be right, we can do this! We can!”

But I see many other terms, too. Every fifth or sixth term these days is Stanford Who’s Who thanks to the post: Oprah Winfrey and the Stanford Who’s Who (click here).

I receive comments and messages from people – usually tales of woe. They find me because, when they type in “Standford Who’s Who”, I’m right up there, in third spot.

Go on, son! Go on!

But the biggest revelation is this: the search terms people use, and subsequently find you by, don’t relate to your headlines.

If you load your headlines with top search terms – Google is typed in 618 million times a month; Lady Gaga averages 25 million; Oprah gets 5 million – you’re facing extreme competition: unless your piece gains immediate momentum it will be swept to page 199 on Google, the end of the internet.

Far better to use terms people are looking for, but not in huge numbers. On average, 3,600 people a month search for Stanford Who’s Who and, when they do, I pounce on them.

Cracking the Shits is even less popular. Only 14o people search for this expression each month, but when they do, I’m waiting.

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Well, done, mate, she'll be right.

Blogs are a two-way process. What I write gives insight into me; and the search terms people use to find me give insight into them.

The terms below – all from the last quarter – have stuck in my mind, and not always for good reasons. For the sake of illustration, I’ve divided them into character types, and present them complete with original spelling and syntax.

Many, as you would imagine, deal with sex – depraved, disturbing sex. I actually worry some of these sick bastards have become subscribers (although, if you have, woo-hoo!).

All of these relate to the picture, reproduced below, by Alfred Eisenstaedt. Though merely mentioned in passing in a post about the SNP victory in Scottish elections (click here), it’s been a nice little traffic driver – certainly more than the SNP has been (ungrateful bastards).

The "broken-back" move is a clear winner.

That said, no-one has actually searched for “Alfred Eisenstaedt’s Times Square photo”, but rather things like:

There’s one I rate above all others, though. I like to imagine the person who wrote it on their back in a driveway, a monkey wrench in one hand, a can of oil in the other. Though sweating and dirty, this person feels pretty pumped.

He or she stands up from the driveway and walks into the house, stepping out of the filthy overalls. Those biceps look pretty good in the mirror, don’t they?

The way hyperlinks are anchored or seeded in copy causes consternation in certain circles.

Essentially, it boils down to whether it’s better to say “click here“, thereby giving readers clear direction (a bit like someone shouting “jump” really loudly when your at the edge of a cliff), or to embed your links subtly as you go.

For sure, the constant clamouring of blue or purple lettering in an otherwise monotone text can be off-putting.

Getting to links means cracking through the ice of a text, rescuing those pages and pictures bobbing helplessly under the surface? – it’s an inconvenience, and generally you can’t be arsed.

They’re simply footnotes, or those little numbers in modern editions of Dickens next to “cutting the throats of the Graces” and other obscure phraseology. Who actually flicks to page 487 to get the full explanation? Erm, I do … sometimes.

In their defence, hyperlinks do a few important things:

1) They show there’s a primary source, whether or not you choose to verify it, even just to make sure the author’s not having a laugh at your expense.

2) Well thought-out hyperlinks give you more than the link to some crappy Wikipedia page or a some gigantic, scholarly tome. Done well, they add real value.

3) As the writer, if you can’t be arsed, they give you an opt-out from explaining sexual selection or macropodidae, or even describing something as simple as two kangaroos shagging in front of stunned boy.

One less obtrusive approach is the Easter egg link – seemingly random gifts that take your most diligent readers in new directions. Whether a word or a single letter, they’re saying: you won’t see me, but I’m here, blue and waiting, like the undead …

Chances are you’re not even reading this. Online, it’s been said, people are “flat-out less likely to read funny headlines”. Not that I’m saying the headline’s funny; because it’s not; but I’ve seen far worse.

Wheeler attends the American Copy Editors Society’s annual conference, where delegates are workshopping headlines for a story on Leonard Nimoy’s move into cooking:

“Spice: The Final Frontier” is one; “Spice me up, Scotty,” is another.

Because I write headlines for a living, I can’t help adding, at least in my head: “It’s a knife, Jim, but not as we know it,” and the more laboured: “Star Shifts Enterprise”.

But Wheeler’s article suggests that, in the age of search engine optimisation, funny headlines – such as those with puns – are an endangered species, almost certain to go extinct. The following should give you an sense of the tenor:

“Sharp, witty headlines that stray off the ‘literalness’ line will live, barely, for a little while longer […] As the veterans of newspapers are gradually replaced by younger copy editors who grew up with the Web, we will see such headlines less and less.”

Hands up if you dig really funny headlines.

In a magazine or newspaper, the headline “It’s a knife, Jim, but not as we know it” across a double-page photograph of Leonard Nimoy chopping a carrot would work fine.

But in the cold light of internet, where actual search terms are king, you have to mention Leonard Nimoy, or at least Spock, and somehow communicate the story, ideally in eight words or less. “Spock takes to the wok?” might work, as might the double-barrelled: “Spock and wok: Leonard Nimoy moves into cooking.”

Identifying what people look for online is the goal of content farms, where people work like battery hens, taking words that perform well in SEO terms and weaving them into some kind of (gobbledygook) narrative: they file up to 10 stories a shift, hitting deadlines every 25 minutes.

The sole purpose of such farms is to attract high readership figures – or click-on figures – which in turn are used as leverage to sell ads.

Is this good news, bad news, or neither?

And what happens if you load headlines and copy with sex? More of that later … maybe tomorrow.

One of the joys of writing a blog, as opposed to writing on bits of looroll you let the wind rip from your hands as you step from a Portaloo, is the little box on your dashboard – with WordPress at least – that shows the search engine terms people have used en route to finding you, the actual words they tap into Google.

I look at these regularly, searching for hints (over and above Site Stats, that love-hate numbers game of the blogger) that people like what I’m doing, or have at least thought to look for me.

In my case, I’m glad to say there are quite a few instances of people keying in “Paul Dalgarno” (and a not-surpising-because-it-happens-a-lot number looking for “Paul Delgarno”. Sure, I sometimes imagine snapping off the finger that’s typed the erroneous “e” but mostly I kind of like it: it makes me feel Cuban, like Scarface, and hard as nails.)

Some people type “innocent in australia” too, but the vast majority seem to have stumbled on to the site by accident. They’ve come to it blind and grappling.

An awful lot could be described as “miscalleneous” – search engine terms such as “sliding partition”, “mothers and sisters forego food in India”, and the diminutive “buh means”.

The philosophy behind search engine optimisation involves making your posts, and particularly your headlines, rich in terms people are likely to be looking for anyway.

The first time I really tried to do this was with Oprah Winfrey and the Stanford Who’s Who. I was thinking, of course, that a percentage of people who punched Oprah Winfrey into their search engine of choice would find me, and that I’d become an internet sensation, and that Oprah would invite me on to her show. I had it all planned, you see.

On the day of posting I received the lowest readership figures of my blogging career and, I sincerely hope, my career as a professional writer.

It was a shock to the system. When no-one reads your blog, three things go through your mind:

I’m not getting paid for this.

Everyone hates me.

I’m not getting paid for this and everyone hates me.

Now, some months later, that same post is one of my most-read and, in time, will almost certainly be number one.

Not for the Oprah part but the Stanford Who’s Who. Barely a day goes by without several, sometimes many more than several, searchers stumbling on to my site with search terms such as: “Stanford Who’s Who Australia is robbing me”; “Who is really behind Stanford’s Who’s Who?; and “Stanford who is who is legitimate”.

In case you haven’t read the post (ya punk!), I don’t endorse the Stanford Who’s Who; in fact I’m highly suspicious of it. But shit, what a goldmine.

As is fecal matter generally. My site is fourth IN THE WORLD, yes, IN THE WORLD, for the search term “crack the shits” thanks to the post Cracking the shits. I know, I know, stop boasting … pride precedes a fall …

Sometimes I find myself trying to picture the people making the searches and find it helps if I break them into types, a la:

The inquisitor

Many find themselves beached on the shore of the site with questions such as: “are thongs innocent?” (which leads them to this post); or the even more philosophical: “is australia innocent?”

With a certain class of inquisitor – “what happened to the innocent convicts on the first fleet?” or “what is a australia day to write and at least not that long?” – I hope they haven’t taken my account of Australia Day too seriously. I wonder what their teacher might have said (because surely they’re teens trying to plagiarise) if they submitted a carbon copy of the post in question.

The sexually depraved/chronically bored

I feel ambivalent about these searchers. On the one hand, a reader’s a reader; but on the other, it’s a peculiar soul who wants to see a “nude woman in stirrups please”.

I’m unconcerned that someone out there was searching for “black booty bouncing nude” (for who among us hasn’t?) but am slightly taken aback that they then clicked on a post called Sydney (let’s whisper this), I love you.

I can only hope he/she found what he/she was looking for.

The precarious

I’ve come to think of these searchers as “people in trouble”. Consequently, I feel guilty they’ve wasted time on my site, and only half-hope they’ll become life-long readers.

There are many people in this category, including whoever wrote: “my license was seized in melbourne airport”; and “I’m under snow in scotland”; and the very suspicious: “8.40pm accident heathmont”.

Call me a cynic, but could that have been the person who caused the accident trying to see if it had been reported? And then reading my blog!

The slayer

These are search terms that make me feel glum. Such as: “possible causes of gurgling in throat and coughing up mucus in the elderly.” (Is it too much to hope they had a chuckle reading Kids are plague crow snot goblins that cause man flu?) The same post snared “crow cough and hot head fever in kids” and the charmingly illiterate “plague crow am we good?” Poor things. Sniff.

The silver bullet

These are by far the saddest of all; so sad, in fact, that the category can only handle one search term at a time. Until recently it was “find me friendly anyone in Melbourne” which went some way to breaking my heart. But that was replaced just last week by someone who must then have read the post When will I be famous?: “i want to be famous but i missed my calling.”